I like her, too. But this post is about THE Post. The New York Post. I’ve got a column in there today about Free-Range parenting, and here it is. Enjoy! — L.
Author: lskenazy
My kids have never gone to overnight/sleepaway camp, but I really like this blog from a camp out west. The camp director (or someone!) sent it to me thinking the “Top 10 Things I’ve Learned as a Summer Camp Professional that Make Me a Better Parent” entry would be right up my alley. It is. I particularly like part of lesson 8, about how to resolve conflicts: A great technique for getting a kid to talk is to MOVE. Children, especially boys, can have a hard time expressing their feelings if they feel like an adult is standing there, waiting…
So much is made of any time a child goes missing – including those statistics you hear about hundreds of kids disappearing each day – that it is good to remember that 99.999% of the time they pop right back up.
Gotta admit, this boy has mine beat. A 5-year-old hopped on the New York City subway yesterday and rode it 34 stops, emerging, according to the cops who found him, happy – even ecstatic. (His mom, whom he’d slipped away from, was, of course, hysterical. THEN happy, even ecstatic. ) I started this whole blog last year after I let my 9-year-old ride the subway alone, wrote a column about it and was immediately pounced upon by the media who saw me as a parenting lightning rod. To my shock, they were right. Millions were the people who believed…
…”bad” parents are the ones who parent the way OUR parents did – loving and encouraging us, but not hovering over every outing and stressing over every issue.
It’s front page news out here in San Francisco where I’m visiting, but it’s probably front page news out by you, too: The tragic story of 8-year-old Sandra Cantu, who was abducted and murdered last week in California. Today’s front page story is as inevitable as the media attention: “Case Forces Parents to take Tougher Look at Children’s Safety.” http://tinyurl.com/cfsyyw It’s hard not to take a tough look after a killing like this. As the parents interviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle say, they are hugging their children closer and talking to them about safety. This is good news. Children…
NEW STUDY SHOWS HUGE INCREASE IN ARRESTS OF ON-LINE PREDATORS!!!!! I can guarantee you, that is the headline you are about to hear on TV and read in the papers. And, terrified for your children, you will keep watching or reading, which serves the media darn well. They have lured you in and are holding you captive. Sort of like…online predators! But the folks who actually DID the study would like to clear things up. David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center and his co-director, Janis Wolak, took a look at the number of arrests of on-line…
In case you had a sneaking suspicion that when schools chip away at recess time, they are doing their students no service, along comes this nice little study to say: You’re right. And while we’re at it: Grrrrrr. Thanks to No Child With A #2 Pencil Left Behind, more and more schools are sucking time out of play and handing it over to classroom larnin’. Nothing wrong with larnin’ of course. (Except spelling it that way.) But this study, released last week, found that kids who took a brisk 20 minute walk on a treadmill actually read at a GRADE…
Hello, Readers! We have another guest post today, this one from developmental psychologist Dr. Helene Guldberg, a founder of the wonderful, British, on-line current affairs blog, Spiked (www.spiked-online.com). She’s also author of Reclaiming Childhood: Freedom and Play in an Age of Fear. The thing I found most shocking in this post is that you can’t even take photos of any kid other than yours at a birthday party in England anymore. It’s considered tantamount to porn. Oy. By Helene Guldberg Growing up on the outskirts of Bergen, in Norway, I was given a lot of freedom to roam outside from…
A comment on my post, “Of Peanuts and Pedophiles,” included a link to a Salon story on child sexual abuse. Voila: http://tinyurl.com/cc2qys It’s a disturbing piece, by a guy who worked for a year in a treatment center for juveniles who have raped and molested other kids. Hearing their histories gave him a, “peek inside a dark world I never wanted to see.” A peek so disturbing, he wrote, that he never even hired a babysitter after that. “The risk wasn’t worth the reward of a night on the town or attending an event for my own enjoyment.” From his…